Life is engineerable
University of Toronto's iGEM team
We apply synthetic biology to tackle pressing problems, and train the next generation of scientists to engineer these futures.
01The team
What we do
Synthetic biology treats a living cell as something you can engineer. Give the cell new genetic instructions, and it can do a job it never evolved to do. Every winter, our team selects a global problem and spends the year trying to solve it — designing genetic constructs, modeling the outcomes, and testing the results. In November, we present our work at the iGEM Grand Jamboree, competing with teams from all around the world.
The research is real...
Past teams have tackled antibiotic resistance, landfill emissions, invasive tree diseases, contaminated mine tailings, and industrial plastic waste. Our work produces tangible results, with members having gone on to publish their research or spin out their projects into startups.
so is the training
Most members arrive with little to no research experience, but leave as confident scientists who have completed the full cycle of designing, building, and testing. Whether they move into computational modeling or wet lab research, the skills they build here form the foundation of their careers.
022026 season
PetaBite
Nature has already evolved enzymes for almost every condition on Earth. This year we built a workflow to find the ones that eat PET plastic at room temperature, so wastewater plants could use them without heating anything.
PETadex: putative plastic-degrading enzymes recovered from 27.3 million public sequencing datasets, up from 495 known before.
Copper-release biosensor and selection assays in E. coli that read out PET degradation at high throughput.
An open-source Arduino bioreactor with temperature control, OD600 readings and stirring, built to run in parallel.
Project promotion video
Two minutes. The pitch for a general audience, made by Outreach.
Team presentation
Fourteen minutes. The Jamboree presentation: data, model, assays, bioreactor and results.
Activity data from the assays and the bioreactor feed back into the model, so each round of testing improves the next round of candidates.The season in brief.
In practice
Bench work, teaching, outreach, the Jamboree
Two decades of it, recovered from the team's own archive and browsable by year or category.
03Track record
Every team since 2005
A different problem every year, including the years the record is incomplete. Select a year for the short version, then open it for the project, the awards and the photographs that survive.
PetaBite — room-temperature PET-degrading enzymes mined from the Logan petabase index
Searching the Logan petabase index for PET-degrading enzymes that work at room temperature: a 307-million-sequence catalogue, two new high-throughput assays and an open-source bioreactor.
Photographs
All 78
04The divisions
Who we are
Wet lab, dry lab, hardware, human practices, outreach, venture and web. You don't need a biology degree to make an impact here, and a lot of the team does not have one. Select a slice to learn more about that division.
Applications open every January
Whether you pipette, code, build or write, there is a place for you on the team. Join the mailing list and you will be the first to know when recruitment opens.